Donated once to the EFF and the ACLU at different times. The incredible volume of spam mail, junk mail, and phone calls that I received from these two organizations convinced me to never contribute to them again, as well as likely costing them more than my donation.

My advice: Donate to a local organization, not a national or international one. They are less likely to have hordes of administrative flunkies to bother you later (and consume donation money), and you'll be helping the community you live in. There are good causes in every community in America.

Are the words of Bernie Madoff credible? Is the whole point not that he's a liar proven demonstrably to all rational people? Who cares if he's got some rationalization for hurting people. The rules of our society shouldn't be written by and for sociopathic personalities.

"The prior shows a logical certainty, the latter [absence of evidence] is rationalization."

No, the latter is not mere rationalization; it is a logical use of limited resources (like time and money).

People can come up with a billion crazy theories or stories. We don't have time to test all of them or start using all of them by default. Hence, the responsibility falls upon the story-teller or seller to do the test and present evidence before anyone else gives them attention, time, or money in return. That's not rationalization -- it's simply rational.

As I say in my statistics classes: "The null hypothesis gets the benefit of the doubt; the alternative hypothesis has the burden of proof". (Or as Wikipedia puts it: "Rejecting or disproving the null hypothesis... is a central task in the modern practice of science, and gives a precise sense in which a claim is capable of being proven false. The null hypothesis is generally assumed to be true until evidence indicates otherwise.").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis

"She comes to it in the third or fourth paragraph."

Totally false. Search for "Nads Nads". This appears for the first time in the 32nd paragraph ("The last name on my account was not Drake. I started out as Nads Nads.").

The writer, Nadia Drake (as listed in the byline at Wired.com), doesn't explicate until almost the end of the article: it's not that FB is misinterpreting her actual name as overly exotic, nor is she using a stage or business name, but her account is registered as "Nads N. Nads". She justifies this by saying that her friends commonly call her "Nads" for short and that she also wants to avoid a stalker. That might be justified, but the fact that she buries it near the end of the article, after a whole bunch of support for actual minority and Native American names, makes it feel just a bit self-serving. I would argue that proper journalistic practice would be to front-load this information in the first or second paragraph.

The definition of division is that it's the inverse of multiplication: a/b = x means x*b = a. For example: 6/3 = 2 because 2*3 = 6.

But saying that 6/0 = 0 means 0*0 = 6. Which is obviously incorrect for any purpose.

The major difference here is that in the first scenario the water stops in the sink, while in the second scenario it doesn't (so no division actually occurred). Every scenario you can think of will have this same problem; in your second version the material will have not been consumed, and you'll be in a situation of still needing to deal with it or pass it on, which is totally unlike the first case.

Reflect on why this is literally called an "overflow" error.

And is the apple still consumed as in the first scenario, or does it need to be treated differently afterward?

There is a system called the extended real number line which does in fact have +INF and -INF as usable values. As you expect, division by zero is still undefined even in that situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number_line

On the other hand, there is an extended complex plane (Reimann sphere) with a single added "point at infinity" for which one can consistently define 1/0 = INF. But this is not the same as any standard computer number format, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere

False.

"The expression 1/0 is not defined either as +INF or INF, because although it is true that whenever f(x) -> 0 for a continuous function f(x) it must be the case that 1/f(x) is eventually contained in every neighborhood of the set {INF, +INF}, it is not true that 1/f(x) must tend to one of these points. An example is f(x) = (sin x)/x (as x goes to infinity). (The modulus |1/f(x)|, nevertheless, does approach +INF.)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number_line

"Divide by zero is infinity"

Yes, in the extended complex plane (Reimann sphere); however the "infinity" there is both complex and sign-less and doesn't match any standard computer number format.

No, in the extended real numbers (which has +INF and -INF, similar to standard computer systems), because defining 1/0 = +INF would still cause a contradiction.

"The expression 1/0 is not defined either as +INF or INF, because although it is true that whenever f(x) -> 0 for a continuous function f(x) it must be the case that 1/f(x) is eventually contained in every neighborhood of the set {INF, +INF}, it is not true that 1/f(x) must tend to one of these points. An example is f(x) = (sin x)/x (as x goes to infinity). (The modulus |1/f(x)|, nevertheless, does approach +INF.)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number_line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere